Terrorism and the Three Sillies

This weekend’s edition of Signs of the Times carries several important pieces that I would like to bring to everyone’s attention and then I am going to present a fable that I read as a child that will shed some light on our present situation.

The first article is by Paul Craig Roberts: Is Another 9/11 in the Works? Paul points out that what is happening in global politics – i.e. Bush planning another war in the midst of losing the first one – is totally insane. Yet, as anyone can see, the rhetoric leading up to bombing Iraq was identical to the mad propagandistic ravings that pass for political discourse concerning Iran today. “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” The immediate past tells us that Bush and the Neocons very definitely intend to make war on Iran. And yet, that is so insane that most of us can’t grok it. The US Army is stretched to the breaking point, the economy is floating on illusion, the American people are a heartbeat away from unimaginable financial disaster, and yet Bush and the Warmongers are planning another hideously expensive war… or so it seems. Roberts states the case succinctly:

First of all, Bush lacks the troops to do the job. If the US military cannot successfully occupy Iraq, there is no way that the US can occupy Iran, a country approximately three times the size in area and population. Second, Iran can respond to a conventional air attack with missiles targeted on American ships and bases, and on oil facilities located throughout the Middle East. Third, Iran has human assets, including the Shia majority population in Iraq, that it can activate to cause chaos throughout the Middle East. Fourth, polls of US troops in Iraq indicate that a vast majority do not believe in their mission and wish to be withdrawn. Unlike the yellow ribbon folks at home, the troops are unlikely to be enthusiastic about being trapped in an Iranian quagmire in addition to the Iraqi quagmire. Fifth, Bush’s polls are down to 34 percent, with a majority of Americans believing that Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a mistake. If you were being whipped in one fight, would you start a second fight with a bigger and stronger person? That’s what Bush is doing.

So, since Bush doesn’t have the manpower or the moneypower (or even the cojones) to wage a proper war (I’m being sarcastic here since no war is ever “proper”), what’s he gonna do?

The obvious answer is: Nukem!

Yup. It seems pretty clear that this is the answer that will suit. And Bush and gang have plenty of resources already on hand to do the job without making another blip in the current economic crisis; and just maybe, as a sideline, they can end up nuking Iraq too and “kill two birds with one stone”. I mean, if you are going to start nuking, no reason to hold back, right? Solve all your problems with the same solution!

But there is a problem here: nuking Iran without provocation will absolutely enrage the whole rest of the world that is already feeling a lot of hostility toward the U.S. because there were no WMDs in Iraq not to mention the growing belief all over the planet that Bush and Co were complicit in the 911 attacks.

So, what to do? How to get justification to nuke Iran?

The answer is simple: “Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” The history indicates that Bush and Co are certainly quite capable of engaging in False Flag operations against their own country in order to justify their actions (things they wanted to do and planned to do in advance). As noted above, 911 is most likely just such a scenario even if I think that the Bush Gang were only complicit and did not carry out the entire conspiracy on their own. In that sense, I think that a lot of commentators are correct: the U.S. couldn’t have pulled that off alone. But I digress.

Justifying the nuking of another country is going to take a bit more than a 911 type attack; you know, “like attracts like.” That means that what we (at Signs of the Times) have been saying for some time is becoming more and more likely to transpire: a nuclear attack on the US devised and carried out as a False Flag operation designed to lay blame on Iran. Roberts presents this idea in the following way:

Readers, whose thinking runs ahead of that of most of us, tell me that another 9/11 event will prepare the ground for a nuclear attack on Iran. Some readers say that Bush, or Israel as in Israel’s highly provocative attack on the Jericho jail and kidnapping of prisoners with American complicity, will provoke a second attack on the US. Others say that Bush or the neoconservatives working with some “black ops” group will orchestrate the attack. One of the more extraordinary suggestions is that a low yield, perhaps tactical, nuclear weapon will be exploded some distance out from a US port. Death and destruction will be minimized, but fear and hysteria will be maximized. Americans will be told that the ship bearing the weapon was discovered and intercepted just in time, thanks to Bush’s illegal spying program, and that Iran is to blame. A more powerful wave of fear and outrage will again bind the American people to Bush, and the US media will not report the rest of the world’s doubts of the explanation. Reads like a Michael Crichton plot, doesn’t it? Fantasy? Let’s hope so.

I’m afraid that I don’t exactly agree with this version. I don’t think that minimizing American deaths will be an objective. On the contrary, I think that maximizing American deaths will be deliberately sought so as to maximize the fear and hysteria. That means a nuke attack on American soil – not on a ship – and probably highly populated soil at that.

Moving on to the next item that caught my eye from the weekend edition of Signs: Robert C. Koehler writes a piece entitled Trust Us. In this article he tells the story of Ion Sancho, the election supervisor of Leon County, Fla., my home state. Koehler writes:

The problem is, there’s an anti-democratic force rampaging across the country that wants … privately conducted, secrecy-shrouded elections. The state of Florida even has a bizarre law outlawing manual recounts of election results. This removes all chance of public scrutiny from the process. I humbly submit that this is nuts, and that if we don’t scream out at the top of our lungs we’re going to lose our democracy. What we’re witnessing, I fear – and what isolated watchdogs like Sancho are warning us about, but cannot prevent all by themselves – is democracy’s transition to expensive charade.

I’ve been talking about this since the last election. When I saw what happened then, when the Signs Team had collected certain data, it was clear that fraudulent elections were already a fact of life in the U.S. Certainly, the 2000 election was the last fair election that was ever held in this country and that one was “given” to George Bush by trickery, bribery, coercion, blackmail, and having certain elements in place at the right place and time according to a devious plan. Once Bush had been declared president, he and his minions were then able to suppress any process that might have undone the “appointment.” What’s more, there were then able to set into motion the plan that ensured that whoever they want gets into office whereever and whenever they choose: manipulatable electronic voting.

So folks, its already a done deal. It’s all over but the crying. There is NO chance whatsoever of anyone getting rid of the “Powers That Be” in the U.S. by way of the exercise of the vote. Anybody who suggests anything different to you is just living in denial or deliberately blowing smoke.

The third item on the Weekend Signs Page that I want to talk about is J. Crofts The Two Americas. He writes:

There are two Americas. There’s the America most of you reading this actually believed in-or still believe in. That America is the fabled “land of the free, home of the brave”. That America was founded on the principles of Freedom, limited authority, a free hand to make your own destiny in this life with what talent and smarts you were able or willing to bring forth from yourself, on a legal, social and economic level playing field. That America was the place where your individual beliefs were respected, was where anyone from anywhere could come and start over with the same opportunities as a person born here from a family going back ten generations.
That America was a land and people who had a limited, representative government that guarded them and their Freedom, and more importantly, was held in check by a document known as the Constitution, that enshrined an article called the Bill of Rights-which didn’t deliniate individual rights so much as made boudaries beyond which the government could not trespass. Now reading that, think; do you live in this America? No. You, me-we all live in a different America. This America, in reality a kind of federal empire, drapes itself in the trappings of the America we were all taught was the way this nation was as a form of ideological disguise. We were lied to. This America, the fabled “land of the free, home of the brave”, uses that quote as a slogan, a sugar coating on the many poison pills of lawyer-made laws, regulations, taxes, fines, agencies, and the corrupt ruling class that wields all that power for its own good. In this America, Freedom is a sugar coated lie to get us to accept the many political and social controls imposed upon us. …

Promoted by criminals in three piece suits, known as career politicians. These criminals in three piece suits unfortunately operate not a Constitutionally limited government, but a hydra-headed monster of a government that masquerades itself as many federal, state and local institutions. This monster’s tentacles never stop reaching for more power, more authority, more of YOUR MONEY AND LIFE’S WORK, seizing it and stealing it from YOU! In fact, this monstrous federal government’s reach into our lives is so pervasive, so overwhelming, only the largest of corporations can operate in the country with any degree of latitude. At the pinnacles of power there is a small group of inbred elitists who regularly go back and forth from private life as CEO’s and Directors in the corporate boardrooms to positions of power in government. They are greedy and corrupt beyond description, and have perpretrated literally every act of treason against us-and gotten away with it. …

So, two Americas; one’s a illusory piece of propaganda genius, and we’re stuck in the one with no level playing field, no limited representative government, no guarantee of Rights. It’s a insider’s game and conditions have been ratcheted to squeeze out as much initiative, drive, intelligence and resources out of the American People as possible.

It’s sad, but all too true. This leads us to John Kaminski’s piece Who made this plan? where he writes:

Americans aren’t the good guys anymore. Hollow TV pitchmen still insist our boys are dying for their country, but more and more people know that those lives are being wasted on corporate profits, deliberately squandered for somebody’s twisted big score scheme.

And you know who’s making the money. The very pervs who are orchestrating all these wars. Repeat after me: Carlyle Group.

Maybe the most frightening thing is that so many Americans are going along with the scam. And the more I find out about American history – from George Washington butchering French traders in their sleep on Christmas Eve – maybe they always have.

How many thousands of supposedly responsible Americans are keeping their mouths shut about what really happened on 9/11, or how they knew always the reason for the Iraq war was one big lie? …

People want to talk about politics, candidates? I see a one-party system in the United States dominated by nongentile bankers aligned with the forces of Europe’s old money, which likely in and of itself is nongentile as well, since the major controlling mechanism of human society – the Rothschild controlled banks, whose emblem is the prototype of the flag of Israel – have dominated the world financial scene since long before they pilfered from American citizens the right to control their own money way back in 1913.

But today’s news is worse.

Scheduled start of World War Three was due March 20, when they tried to start up the Iranian bourse (European term for “stock exchange”) trading oil in euros in Tehran.

Doesn’t it give you a warm feeling when you know the sclerotic, twitching finger of Dick Cheney is fiddling with the nuclear button? Here’s a man who has never been stopped, and he can produce the spilled blood to prove it.

Who knows what the latest twist will be in this stranger-then-coincidence confrontation with Iran over another pack of lies? The U.S. picks wars with whomever it wants, and because its citizenry is so drugged-out by bad schools, medicine and food, they roar their drunken approval of these atrocities. …

How many Americans have gone down the rabbithole morally in recent years? Yes, America has always been a cesspool of rape and plunder largely covered over by those who write the history books. There may never have been a time in history when the populace got the straight scoop from the powers that be.

It seemed, though, in the last half of the 20th century in which I spent the better part of my life, that I grew up with a degree of confidence in a system that could produce people like Edward R. Murrow and Joe McCarthy, a world that could conduct a civilized debate and arrive at a logical solution.

Perhaps I was naive. Once upon a time, I loved my country. Now I am very afraid of it.

This brings us to the last news item that catches my attention: Nazis of the Nineties. (Notice that this article was written in 1998!) This is the piece that puts it all together when it tells us:

In his book “The Road to Serfdom,” Friedrich Hayek warned Americans in 1944 that despite their military war against Nazis, they were travelling the philosophical and economic road to that the Nazis were travelling. The Americans ignored that warning. Now along the Americans we are left with the consequences that are coming home to roost in the nineties: a government of omnipotent size and power using its power to kill innocent, peaceful citizens at home and abroad. Today, the number of its victims is in the millions. But at the end of this road lie the deadly bombing and concentration camps for the multitudes. …

The name of the new game to be played in the last year of the twentieth century is “catastrophic terrorism” and it has been made frightening, not because it conceivably could really happen but because of what people who choose to dwell on the possibility, however remote, want to do about it. The anti-biological and anti-weapons of mass destruction American propaganda and actions are already duplicating Hitler’s prior to World War-II tactics.

Any further terrorism from now onwards would be justified in the name of combating “catastrophic terrorism,” which is defined as going far beyond what the US Secretary of Defence William Cohen calls “the conventional type of terrorism.” That is the work of “cowards,” he says, who “rejoice in the agony of their victims.” They then “retreat to villages where they hide behind the skirts of women and the laughter of children and dare you to strike back – and strike back we will.”

“We have to depend upon intervention” he declared on December 8, 1998 and the same views have been expressed by Ashton Carter, John Deusch and Philip Zelikow, two former high-level Defence Department Officials, and a former staff member of National Security Council, in the Foreign Affairs magazine. This propaganda would justify the US armed attack in any part of the world as “prevention” of the sensed danger. Afghanistan and Sudan were probably the first victims of an undeclared Nazi agenda for dominating the world.

The word “Nazi” might offend some Americans but a thorough research can pale Nazi atrocities by comparison with what the US has done and is doing in the name of national interest. CIA, with the help of CNN, BBC and ABC etc., is waging a major propaganda war against the Muslim world in particular, with the help of capitalist media elite and some powerful politicians. Their lies were once totally disregarded by most people, but today, the majority of the people seem to believe the anti “rogue states” propaganda.

We still have too many people, who do not believe that the present American attempts are leading to a US world order and total domination of those nations, which are considered anti-American. They, like the unbelievers in 1939, will not take the time to research the American intentions and wrong doings. If they did, they would see that these warnings are indeed accurate and timely. What the world fails or refuses to recognise is that the concentration camps were simply the logical extension of the Nazi agenda and mind-set. It doesn’t matter if there were six million killed – or six hundred – or six – or even one.

The evil is the belief that the US government should have the power to sacrifice even one individual for the good of the American “nation” and “interest.” Once this basic philosophical premise and political power are conceded, innocent people, beginning with few and inevitable ending in multitudes, will be killed, because “the good of the nation” always ends up requiring it. The UN and rest of the world seem to have conceded this authority to the US so that it freely exercise its Nazi practices. …

And like the German people of the 1930s, Americans either refuse to see it happening, or they rationalise what is happening so that they do not have to deal with it. …

On international level, we observe that Hitler’s words have been put to practice in the form of CNN and BBC. According to Hitler, “the task of propaganda lies not in a scientific training of the individual, but rather in directing the masses towards certain facts, events, necessities, etc., the purpose being to move their importance into the masses’ field of vision.” We can see this at CNN and BBC, as they also stick to a few main points and repeat them over and over. …

Hitler believed that propaganda had to be very simple, so the average person, with very short attention span, could understand it. The thesis is: “If any terrorism conceivably could happen, we must assume that it will, and do something about it now, before it is too late.” This is itself the very essence of psychological terrorism that the world community is constantly ignoring. …

Policy of the Nazis of the nineties is now being established in such a manner that any nation capable of posing a threat to US interests at any time in the future is a legitimate target for American attacks. It is the intention of the Nazis in Washington to so bring the nations into such despair that they will gladly give themselves over to the new despotism. They are prepared to give up their hopes and dreams, their religions and economies for the brief promise of rest from the turmoils placed before them. …

The Nazi regime of the thirties set out to gain control by focusing on three main areas: regulatory, persuasive and intimidatory. Regulation is being done through different UN resolution and their selective enforcement; persuasion is being done through electronic and print media and intimidation through missile strikes from the pirate ships. Resolutions passed by the Security Council in the early nineties have been the catalyst to the transformation of US to a nazified, and the world as a whole to be its centralised state.

In late thirties, the history was transformed to emphasise the superiority of German civilisation, with German heroes coming to the forefront. German failures were either left out of the unit or blamed on the Jews. The same is happening in the late nineties with the American heroes giving details of their ruthless bombings on the CNN with pride in militarism. Like Nazis, the US administration wants to create a static world society whereby nations act unquestionably, and do little thinking for themselves. …

CNN has become the most effective brainwashing tool, showing no victims of the 400 cruise missiles they way they show Israeli victims of a single Hizbollah rocket. None of us try to wait and reach to the root causes of the issue before making a pro-American mind after seeing these images.

They say “might is right” but this saying cannot be proven in actual history. “Might” just falls harder when it is “not right.” The US actions may not have surpassed the Nazi atrocities. But that’s today.

Again, let me mention that the above article was written in 1998 and already some of its predictions have been validated. This is the article that made me think of the folk tale of my childhood. When I read the following:

Hitler believed that propaganda had to be very simple, so the average person, with very short attention span, could understand it. The thesis is: “If any terrorism conceivably could happen, we must assume that it will, and do something about it now, before it is too late.” This is itself the very essence of psychological terrorism that the world community is constantly ignoring. …

Put together with this:

“We have to depend upon intervention” he declared on December 8, 1998 and the same views have been expressed by Ashton Carter, John Deutsch and Philip Zelikow, two former high-level Defence Department Officials, and a former staff member of National Security Council, in the Foreign Affairs magazine. This propaganda would justify the US armed attack in any part of the world as “prevention” of the sensed danger. Afghanistan and Sudan were probably the first victims of an undeclared Nazi agenda for dominating the world.

If any terrorism conceivably could happen, we must assume that it will, and do something about it now, before it is too late. This propaganda would justify the US armed attack in any part of the world as “prevention” of the sensed danger.

This leads us to the story of the Three Sillies by Joseph Jacobs:

Once upon a time there was a farmer and his wife who had one daughter, and she was courted by a gentleman. Every evening he used to come and see her, and stop to supper at the farmhouse, and the daughter used to be sent down into the cellar to draw the beer for supper. So one evening she had gone down to draw the beer, and she happened to look up at the ceiling while she was drawing, and she saw a mallet stuck in one of the beams. It must have been there a long, long time, but somehow or other she had never noticed it before, and she began a- thinking. And she thought it was very dangerous to have that mallet there, for she said to herself: “Suppose him and me was to be married, and we was to have a son, and he was to grow up to be a man, and come down into the cellar to draw the beer, like as I’m doing now, and the mallet was to fall on his head and kill him, what a dreadful thing it would be!” And she put down the candle and the jug, and sat herself down and began a-crying.

Well, they began to wonder upstairs how it was that she was so long drawing the beer, and her mother went down to see after her, and she found her sitting on the settle crying, and the beer running over the floor. “Why, whatever is the matter?” said her mother. “Oh, mother!” says she, “look at that horrid mallet! Suppose we was to be married, and was to have a son, and he was to grow up, and was to come down to the cellar to draw the beer, and the mallet was to fall on his head and kill him, what a dreadful thing it would be!” “Dear, dear! what a dreadful thing it would be!” said the mother, and she sat her down aside of the daughter and started a-crying too. Then after a bit the father began to wonder that they didn’t come back, and he went down into the cellar to look after them himself, and there they two sat a- crying, and the beer running all over the floor. “Whatever is the matter?” says he. “Why,” says the mother, “look at that horrid mallet. Just suppose, if our daughter and her sweetheart was to be married, and was to have a son, and he was to grow up, and was to come down into the cellar to draw the beer, and the mallet was to fall on his head and kill him, what a dreadful thing it would be!” “Dear, dear, dear! so it would!” said the father, and he sat himself down aside of the other two, and started a-crying.

Now the gentleman got tired of stopping up in the kitchen by himself, and at last he went down into the cellar too, to see what they were after; and there they three sat a-crying side by side, and the beer running all over the floor. And he ran straight and turned the tap. Then he said: “Whatever are you three doing, sitting there crying, and letting the beer run all over the floor?”

“Oh!” says the father, “look at that horrid mallet! Suppose you and our daughter was to be married, and was to have a son, and he was to grow up, and was to come down into the cellar to draw the beer, and the mallet was to fall on his head and kill him!” And then they all started a-crying worse than before. But the gentleman burst out a- laughing, and reached up and pulled out the mallet, and then he said: “I’ve travelled many miles, and I never met three such big sillies as you three before; and now I shall start out on my travels again, and when I can find three bigger sillies than you three, then I’ll come back and marry your daughter.” So he wished them good-bye, and started off on his travels, and left them all crying because the girl had lost her sweetheart.

Well, he set out, and he travelled a long way, and at last he came to a woman’s cottage that had some grass growing on the roof. And the woman was trying to get her cow to go up a ladder to the grass, and the poor thing durst not go. So the gentleman asked the woman what she was doing. “Why, lookye,” she said, “look at all that beautiful grass. I’m going to get the cow on to the roof to eat it. She’ll be quite safe, for I shall tie a string round her neck, and pass it down the chimney, and tie it to my wrist as I go about the house, so she can’t fall off without my knowing it.” “Oh, you poor silly!” said the gentleman, “you should cut the grass and throw it down to the cow!” But the woman thought it was easier to get the cow up the ladder than to get the grass down, so she pushed her and coaxed her and got her up, and tied a string round her neck, and passed it down the chimney, and fastened it to her own wrist. And the gentleman went on his way, but he hadn’t gone far when the cow tumbled off the roof, and hung by the string tied round her neck, and it strangled her. And the weight of the cow tied to her wrist pulled the woman up the chimney, and she stuck fast half-way and was smothered in the soot.

Well, that was one big silly.

And the gentleman went on and on, and he went to an inn to stop the night, and they were so full at the inn that they had to put him in a double-bedded room, and another traveller was to sleep in the other bed. The other man was a very pleasant fellow, and they got very friendly together; but in the morning, when they were both getting up, the gentleman was surprised to see the other hang his trousers on the knobs of the chest of drawers and run across the room and try to jump into them, and he tried over and over again, and couldn’t manage it; and the gentleman wondered whatever he was doing it for. At last he stopped and wiped his face with his handkerchief. “Oh dear,” he says, “I do think trousers are the most awkwardest kind of clothes that ever were. I can’t think who could have invented such things. It takes me the best part of an hour to get into mine every morning, and I get so hot! How do you manage yours?” So the gentleman burst out a-laughing, and showed him how to put them on; and he was very much obliged to him, and said he never should have thought of doing it that way.

So that was another big silly.

Then the gentleman went on his travels again; and he came to a village, and outside the village there was a pond, and round the pond was a crowd of people. And they had got rakes, and brooms, and pitchforks, reaching into the pond; and the gentleman asked what was the matter. “Why,” they say, “matter enough! Moon’s tumbled into the pond, and we can’t rake her out anyhow!” So the gentleman burst out a- laughing, and told them to look up into the sky, and that it was only the shadow in the water. But they wouldn’t listen to him, and abused him shamefully, and he got away as quick as he could.

So there was a whole lot of sillies bigger than them three sillies at home. So the gentleman turned back home again and married the farmer’s daughter, and if they didn’t live happy for ever after, that’s nothing to do with you or me.

It’s a pretty funny story, yes? Most of the silliness of human beings is as generally innocuous as the examples in this story. Of course, the dingbat trying to get the cow on the roof killed her cow and died herself in the exercise of her silliness, so that warns us that our ignorance and simple-mindedness can be fatal. But in general, silliness isn’t fatal. It is only fatal when this tendency of human beings is used by those who do not have the best interests of the masses at heart.

Can you imagine what the farmer and his family would have done if the gentleman caller, instead of pointing out that their imaginations were the cause of their distress and that the answer was simple: remove the object that was triggering their imaginations to run wild, had rather decided to play on their fears for his own agenda? What if he wanted to take the land of an enemy? He could have told the farmer and family that this neighbor had planted the mallet in the ceiling to cause exactly the tragedy that the farmer’s daughter feared. They would have then taken up their pitchforks and firebrands and gone at once to the home of the declared evildoer, killed him and taken his possessions.

If any terrorism conceivably could happen, we must assume that it will, and do something about it now, before it is too late. This propaganda would justify the US armed attack in any part of the world as “prevention” of the sensed danger.

That is exactly how the American people are being controlled. They have been “hystericized” and this process has been ongoing for the past 50 years or more – since the Nazi scientists were brought back to America from Germany and put to work to help the US achieve global dominance, to become the Seat of the New World Order. As Abid Ullah Jan wrote on 5 Jan 1998:

In his book “The Road to Serfdom,” Friedrich Hayek warned Americans in 1944 that despite their military war against Nazis, they were travelling the philosophical and economic road to that the Nazis were travelling. The Americans ignored that warning. Now along the Americans we are left with the consequences that are coming home to roost in the nineties: a government of omnipotent size and power using its power to kill innocent, peaceful citizens at home and abroad. Today, the number of its victims is in the millions. But at the end of this road lie the deadly bombing and concentration camps for the multitudes. …

It’s here, it’s now. The only thing that will save us now is a global cataclysm from the “outside.” And that will exact its own heavy toll. But maybe that is what is really meant by the “Second Coming?”

Food for thought.

Originally Published 2006_03_18